James joyce, p.7
James Joyce, page 7
Refashioning the Parnell Myth in Exile
The Parnellism of the Joyce who left Dublin had been marked by a certain reticence—he was unsure of how it related to contemporary Irish politics, and relating it to his writing, then at an early stage of its development, seemed even more challenging. The early parts of the semi-autobiographical Stephen Hero covering the period of the Split have not survived and Parnell’s name is not mentioned in what remains, though the treatment of the Catholic Church bears the clear impress of the Split. Joyce did not work out how to treat the figure of Parnell until early exile.
In the early Dubliners stories, written in Dublin, Parnell featured as an unnamed absence in the invocation of post-Split Ireland. Then came ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, written in Trieste in August 1905 (though Dubliners was to be denied publication until 1914). The story marked the realisation of the strategy that Joyce had at length devised to overcome what had seemed an indefeasible combination of artistic and political constraints: he had resolved not to portray Parnell directly but to catch him in the mirror of his myth in contemporary Ireland. He would write of the unfolding of Parnell’s myth, working within that myth as he found it. In rendering Parnell as a spectral absence in the flickering light of the committee room, he had finally found a means of reconciling his identification with Parnell and his art. He would track the contemporary course of the Parnell myth, so that his treatment of Parnell and Parnell-related themes would have, at least as a point of departure, an objective realism.
Joyce observed what was an exigent self-inhibition. It committed him to tracking the course of the Parnell myth, and to taking his cue from public invocations of Parnell’s memory. Thus Joyce’s magnificent 1912 article ‘L’ombra di Parnell’ in the Triestine newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera was less prompted than enabled within the terms of Joyce’s stringent protocol by an editorial article on Parnell by Arthur Griffith in Sinn Féin. Joyce elected to observe and to draw on public or popular manifestations of the myth, rather than to run ahead of the unfolding of the myth and to impose a Parnell that was purely of his own contriving. Joyce had found a way of rendering Parnell that was neither messianic nor merely elegiac.
Parnell and Split-inflected themes thereafter featured in all of Joyce’s writing after ‘Ivy Day’. They inform the aestheticised Parnellian hauteur of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Parnell’s presence in Ulysses, if naggingly recurrent, is for the most part spectral and oblique. In the only direct portrayal of Parnell in his fictional writing, in the fracas at the office of United Ireland at the outset of the Split on Irish terrain, Leopold Bloom gives Parnell back his hat, which had been knocked off. Joyce thereby cunningly inserts Bloom into the narrative of Richard Barry O’Brien’s classic 1898 biography. Parnell later haunts Finnegans Wake. He endures as a Promethean figure, still and forever pursued by an anti-Parnellite horde in the dreamworld of the Wake. The register of the Wake is nevertheless different. Joyce at last acquiesces in, but negotiates with Parnellite bravura, Parnell’s passing into history.
The imaginative transformation lay in using the contemporary traces of Parnell’s memory to refashion Parnell’s myth in such a way as to render it faithful to his attributes in life and to his political purpose. That was what Parnell’s official apologists had signally failed to do in the aftermath of his death. Joyce was consciously writing against the grain of the received myth in its political aspect and against the oblivion of the Split. In reconstituting the myth from the bottom up, Joyce gracefully shadowed the process by which Parnell had risen to prominence by winning the trust of the Irish people. It was much more than an exquisite miniature portrait by which Joyce requited a debt of allegiance acquired in youth. It is a consummate imaginative achievement. It sealed his compact with the dead leader, with whom his sense of complicity was neither passive nor unearned.
The limits of the influence of Parnell and of the Split cannot be exhaustively demarcated. The biography and posthumous myth to which Joyce was most attentive was Parnell’s. Parnell’s life became in some degree a vade mecum in Joyce’s own. Through his dwelling on the ascent and fall of Parnell, Joyce became acutely conscious of the personal myths that attach to individuals and that affected not just his treatment of the great and famous historical figures of whom people continue to tell stories and enhance their legends after their demise. His conception of the public self was more far-reaching: an artist as well as a political leader, or someone who was neither, could have a public self.14 In his work and extra-textually, Joyce, who had been so long denied publication and such fame as might attend publication, acquired an authorial mythos which he sought to advance and to inflect. The fictionalisation of the authorial self is a defining stratagem of his modernism. For Joyce it had its inception as much in the contemplation of Parnell’s life as that of any writer.
The Critical Treatment of Joyce’s Parnellism
That Parnell was the dominant political figure of Joyce’s childhood and youth is widely acknowledged by biographers and critics, but the significance of this, and the development of the Parnell motif and of issues derived from the Split in Joyce’s work and thought, has defied integral treatment. Richard Ellmann treats the Parnell theme well in his biography so far as it relates to the early Joyce,15 but misses Parnell’s persisting significance for his subject. Ellmann’s bracketing of Parnell with Christ in Joyce’s early thinking and writing as victims of betrayal, though not impercipient,16 is self-delimiting in his treatment of what was Joyce’s complex lifelong relationship to Parnell. In a section entitled ‘Beyond Parnell’ in The Consciousness of Joyce, this deficiency is underscored by Ellmann’s assertion that Joyce moved beyond Parnell to Arthur Griffith, the driving force behind the original Sinn Féin.17 Ellmann’s belief that Joyce ‘was not the man to worship the dead’ mis-poses the issue of Joyce’s Parnellism.18 It is aggravated by the dismissive rendering of Joyce’s relation to Parnell as ‘worship’, missing the dialogic character of Joyce’s relationship to the dead leader. Joyce admired Griffith’s journalism and had sympathy with the political project he doggedly pursued, but Griffith did not exert anything like Parnell’s influence on Joyce. There is in Joyce no ‘beyond Parnell’ in Ellmann’s sense. Ellmann was sufficiently wedded to this idea to reformulate it five years later, on the hundredth anniversary of Joyce’s birth: ‘Joyce is sometimes said to have been a lifelong Parnellite, but he was opposed to turning great dead men into stone effigies. In Ulysses he mocks the idea that Parnell is still alive and will return.’19 This too is an aberrant misreading in which Ellmann failed to appreciate that Joyce’s critique, in resisting the foreclosure of political defeat of the entombment of Parnell’s memory, was the expression of a quest to re-open the potentialities that Parnell espoused and embodied. Seamus Deane provided a lucid and elegant introduction to A Portrait for Penguin Classics but also treats Joyce’s Parnellism as a youthful preoccupation: ‘It seems remarkable that the heterogeneity of Joyce’s later texts coincides with a diminution of the Parnellism that had been so evident in the early books and in the Italian essays and lectures.’20 Phillip F. Herring, a distinguished scholar of Joyce, in a strangely bitter address entitled ‘Joyce’s Politics’, said Parnell was ‘a sort of political projection of his own role as persecuted artist victimized by the traitorous people he sought to serve’ and asserted that ‘his bitterness at the fall of Parnell did not apparently result from any sympathy for the man personally or the cause he championed’.21
Historians of Ireland, typically drawn to Yeats over Joyce, have not fared much better on Joyce’s relation to Parnell: F.S.L. Lyons discerned in Joyce a ‘bad case of arrested Parnellism’.22 The diagnosis is nevertheless superior to Ellmann’s in the instinctive recognition of a major historian of the period of the centrality of Parnell to Joyce’s Irish politics.
The argument of this book departs from that of many postcolonial readings of Joyce’s politics, principally on the ground that his politics in the large sense cannot be understood unless one first considers the political views Joyce actually held and his incisive response to contemporary Irish politics in both his fiction and non-fiction. Imputing to Joyce a generic anti-imperialism achieves little beyond positing a plane of discussion in which Joyce’s actual politics can be conveniently relativised, if not ignored.23 The same applies to misconceived historicising quests to contextualise a writer of high attentiveness to the Irish political by reference to strains of contemporary Irish (or English) political writing and thought which have no demonstrable bearing on Joyce’s actual beliefs and convictions.24 It is on the subject of Joyce’s nationalism that postcolonial criticism of Joyce falls into ideological blatancy. Emer Nolan’s work, which has had considerable influence, is entitled James Joyce and Nationalism. The ‘and’ says much. In her account, Joyce renders nationalism in his work but it is not suggested that Joyce is a nationalist, which could be inconvenient for her argument.25 She explains that ‘Nationalism’, for the first children of the Irish Free State and the new republic, signified the official ideology of the post-revolutionary state, designed to distract attention from economic failure ‘about “a people coming out of captivity”, told by the pusillanimous middle class revolutionaries to whom all the benefits of independence accrued’.26 That definition of course puts paid to the idea that Joyce could have been an Irish nationalist. Andrew Gibson, in his The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce, 1898–1915, exhibits the same inhibition in relating Joyce’s non-fictional writings of 1907–12 to his ‘sense of a battle to be fought alongside nationalists, against conservatism and unionism, over the public image of the Irish, and their right to a place in the modern world’.27 That tortuous construct asserts that Joyce the anti-imperialist was showing solidarity with the Irish nationalist cause, but was not himself an Irish nationalist. How Joyce could have been a Parnellite, as Gibson repeatedly accepts, without being a nationalist is not explained. On the other edge of postcolonialism, Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge write of Joyce that ‘philosophically he could be said to have been both a separatist and a unionist, thinking constantly in terms of oppositions and that which dissolves (or reverses) oppositions.’28 There is no sense in which, philosophically or politically, Joyce could be said to have been a Unionist.
It is not simply that Joyce’s relation to Parnell and the Parnell Split is a neglected facet of Joyce’s political biography. There is a false frontier interposed between literature and politics that finds expression in a persisting critical disposition to treat Parnell as exogenous to Joyce’s art, as something ‘out there’ in a separate realm of Irish politics, rather than as an active element in his thought and writing. Critically unfashionable as it may be as a proposition, the Parnell theme is an integral part of Joyce’s parcours as a writer.
The increased critical attention to the role of Parnell and of nationalism in Joyce’s work reflects a wider attentiveness to the treatment of the social and political in Joyce’s writing, which in an important aspect is interwoven with his own struggles as an artist. Joyce is frequently taken to have embraced, through the figure of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait, a concept of transcendental authorial autonomy. The idea that Joyce was asserting the freedom of the artist from history and social determination has been devastatingly assailed by Margot Norris. She has identified Joyce’s insistent rendering in his fictional writing of the inhibitions, material and political, which as a writer he had to overcome. Her 1992 Joyce’s Web contested what had been the prevalent identification of Joyce with modernistic aestheticism, which had brought about the canonisation of Joyce for ‘an ahistoricism and an apoliticism that appears to repeat Stephen’s heroic Non-Serviam from Portrait’. She asserts cogently that Joyce historicises and subverts his own modernist aestheticism: ‘Joyce’s texts can be made … to yield their own negation of artistic autonomy by betraying their genesis in Irish colonialism and lower class poverty’. This argument is the source of her disagreement with Ellmann: ‘Perhaps more than other literary biographies, the Ellmann biography reinforces the ideology of artistic autonomy by trivialising and denigrating what falls outside Joyce’s art, including, as Robert Scholes has argued, Joyce’s socialist and other political tendencies.’29 Norris has hacked away at a cornerstone of the edifice that sustains the idea of Joyce as a politics-disdaining artist.
It is striking that Joyce’s actual political convictions, to the extent to which they can be established (which is considerable), have not been systematically addressed since Dominic Manganiello’s pioneering and exemplary Joyce’s Politics, published in 1980, over four decades ago. That is because the subject of Joyce’s political philosophy and convictions is not favoured in contemporary Joyce criticism. Perhaps because Manganiello had Ellmann as a supervisor, his work is considered to be tainted like Ellmann’s own by liberal humanism, something that is anathema to certain schools of Joyce criticism. (That is not to posit an argument that Joyce was a liberal, which he was not).30
Joyce’s politics and his modelling of history are of a brilliance, originality, and coherence that have passed mostly unrecognised. That owes much to the fact that his negotiation of the political is for the most part oblique, rendered as from an angle of vision. His politics and imaginative rendering of history warrant consideration in their own right for what they tell us about Irish history and politics, rather than merely as an elucidation of particular episodes in Joyce’s life, or as an explanatory gloss to his work.
1. See Vivien Igoe, The Real People of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Biographical Guide (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016), 107–8.
2. Quoted in Morley, Life of Gladstone, 3:437.
3. OCPW 196. The Liberals were not in office in 1890. John Morley was an essayist, biographer, and member of Parliament for the radical constituency of Newcastle-on-Tyne, which had a significant Irish electorate in 1883–95, and Gladstone’s pre-eminent co-adjutor on Irish politics. He was Chief Secretary for Ireland in Gladstone’s last administration in 1892–95, which is presumably why Joyce erroneously thought he was in office in 1890. Morley was subsequently the member of Parliament for Montrose Burghs from 1896 to 1908. He published his canonical biography of Gladstone in 1903. Created a viscount in 1908, he resigned from the Liberal government on its decision to intervene in the Great War in 1914. In the article, Joyce was often inaccurate in historical and political detail while capturing the essence of things.
4. Freeman’s Journal, 29 November 1890; F.S.L. Lyons, The Fall of Parnell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 320–36.
5. Frank Callanan, The Parnell Split, 1890–91 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1992), 52.
6. Freeman’s Journal, 2 December 1890; R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell (London: Smith Elder, 1898), 2:278.
7. Callanan, Parnell Split, 63. Parnell had also referred to entering the promised land in his first major speech in Committee Room 15. Callanan, Parnell Split, 41.
8. U 7.812–69.
9. ‘His hat was off now, his hair dishevelled, the dust of the conflict begrimed his well-brushed coat’. R. B. O’Brien, Charles Stewart Parnell, 2:296; U 16.1495–528; Callanan, Parnell Split, 64.
10. Callanan, Parnell Split, 67.
11. Phillip Herring could hardly be more wrong in writing that Joyce’s ‘bitterness at the fall of Parnell did not apparently result from any sympathy with the man personally or the cause he championed’. Herring, ‘Joyce’s Politics’, 8.
12. OCPW 194.
13. C. P. Curran, Under the Receding Wave (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970), 116. I take Curran as meaning that, as well as not being politically active, Joyce’s Parnellism was severed from contemporary politics, an assessment I challenge. However, in realising that Joyce had some intellectual relationship to Irish nationalism, though he was far from recognising him as a nationalist, Curran was much more astute than Joyce’s other contemporaries in University College.
14. The idea of a public self is antecedent to that of a scandal in which the public figure is brought down, the subject of Margot Gayle Backus, Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
15. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 32–34. Unless otherwise noted, citations refer to the revised edition. Ellmann wrote that ‘Joyce has described the Christmas dinner in 1891, when his father and John Kelly raged and wept over Parnell’s betrayal and death’ (34). This translation from fiction into autobiographical factuality is what Ellmann is most sternly criticised for, but he is certainly not the first or the last to have done so in the case of the Christmas dinner scene. That he should have limited his description of the scene itself to the single sentence quoted, after a detailed consideration of Joyce’s Parnell poem, suggests that he may have had some scruples about its historical actuality. I conclude for reasons that are advanced later that the Christmas dinner scene never took place.
16. Ellmann, James Joyce, 149, 293.
17. Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 86–90. Ellmann, in his biography, writes of Joyce in his correspondence with Stanislaus from Rome ‘rejecting parliamentarianism and supporting Arthur Griffith’, which is much too simplistic. Ellmann glosses this thus: ‘In this stand he was not inconsistent; Parnell had gone as far with Parliament as possible, and Kettle could scarcely accomplish what Parnell had failed in’ (James Joyce, 237). That Parnell had gone as far ‘with Parliament’ as possible was Ellmann’s judgement rather than one expressed by Joyce.
